


associates

by Purrs



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Eye Trauma, Gen, Identity Issues, M/M, Personhood, Post Season 4, Recovery, and other forms of trauma, jonah does not actually appear but his presence is strong, post episode 160
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21819016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Purrs/pseuds/Purrs
Summary: Subverted, imprisoned, replaced; exposed, invaded, dissipated: both left to forget and be forgotten, both thrust back into the world as it was shaped anew. After the apocalypse, Peter and Elias have to deal with existing.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard & Jonah Magnus, Elias Bouchard & Peter Lukas, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Peter Lukas/Jonah Magnus
Comments: 21
Kudos: 86





	1. Chapter 1

fog

~~pain~~

~~ripped apart~~

~~broken~~

drifting

~~existing~~

fog

wisps and fragments and chill pressing in ~~pressing in against what?~~

quiet

absence

~~missing~~

mist

fog

void

lack

~~longing~~

~~gone~~

fog

lonely

Lonely

fog

fog

fog

a shattering, a growing, an emergence. a loosing of chains on _all that crawls and chokes and blinds and falls and twists and leaves and hides and weaves and burns and hunts and rips and leads and dies._

(all that leaves.)

brought into the world at last.

(bringing the remnants of something (someone) with it.)

He (he?) is panting gasping heaving, cool mist hissing through ribs, hands and knees and forehead set on the cold stone floor. Cold. Cold is fog is emptiness is Lonely is what he chose to be what he always was, but he can’t drift away now. Can he? No. He wouldn’t come back. The floor is rough on his hands and he scrapes them against it, stinging reddening beading up. He.

Peter?

Peter.

Peter shifts, kneels, stands. Fingers grasp the arm of an empty chair. Empty? Shouldn’t be empty. Where did the occupant go? Who was he?

Oh. There’s a man in his thoughts. Important. The shape changes, the name changes, the man. His man.

James.

James... James at some point. James at a time that mattered, he thinks. Not James now. Not James when the man first was. But James is the name that sticks in his head, pinned down like an insect.

He has to find James.

  
  


He—Peter—walks through tunnels and up stairs and corridors and more stairs and into James’s (his own?) (James’s) office without knocking (he’s never needed to knock, not really, but James has always appreciated it) and he says—well, first he just says “James.”

And then he says “You did—something. James, what did you _do?_ ” Because the world is different, somehow, he can feel it.

The man sat in the chair doesn’t so much as turn around to face him. Arse. (And a nice arse, too, but this is _not the time_.)

”When were you going to tell me, James?” Maybe he already had. Peter rather thinks he might have, actually, come to think of it. But Peter can’t _remember_. And James should’ve said something by now. Not James? Did he want a different name? “Elias,” Peter manages, summoning it up from somewhere. No response. There was another name. The first name. It wasn’t James but it was like James. “Jonah?” That’s it. Still nothing. “ _Jonah_.”

In a statement—the Archivist—in one of James’s precious Archivist’s statements, this would be the moment where the man in the chair would turn out to be dead. Shock, horror. Rot, maybe, or just the...the End, plain and simple. The chair might swivel around dramatically, a corpse in the seat and nothing more. But this isn’t some clueless idiot’s brief brush with a Power, no, this is James. _His_ James. James who can’t possibly be dead now, not at his moment of, his goddamn moment of triumph. Not right when he’s won, and Peter knows it was him. He _knows_. It couldn’t be anyone else.

Besides. He can hear breathing. So that proves it.

“Elias,” he says, because that’s the name the man’s heard the most in recent years. “Answer me. Say something.” If there were ever a time he wished he were Beholding instead of fog-silence-absence-Lonely, it’d be now.

And the man does respond, though it’s only a grunt. It’s soft, but Peter hears it. Then the man jerks, as if startled at his own vocalization. “...Puh. Peter?” It comes out slurred, like he’s drunk. Did he get pissed to celebrate?

“Yes, it’s Peter. James, _what did you do?”_ He’s not mad. Is he? He feels...used.

“Nnnnot.”

“ _Elias_ ,” he says, because apparently James is picking now of all times to be finicky about names.

“That’s...me.”

“Will you at least look at me?”

Silence.

Peter strides around the desk, around the chair to get himself face to face with James. “Oh, for _fuck’s sake, Elias—_ ”

James is blind.

No.

James is gone.

 _Elias_ is blind.

Eyelids blink slowly, falling closed and hollow with nothing behind them. Opening again on darkness.

“That’s me,” Elias repeats, voice flat but, Peter thinks, misted with wonder. His hand curls, thumb brushing over his knuckles. Uncurls. Rises to rub the blood off his cheeks, but only succeeds in smearing the congealed half-crusted redness further across his face.


	2. Chapter 2

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“James,” Peter says, frustrated. “Jonah.”

There’s a pause before Elias answers, like there has been every time since Peter came in. “Left.”

“ _Left?_ ”

“Yeah.”

“Where did he go?”

“Somewhere. Probably.”

Peter can’t tell if that’s supposed to be uncertain or flippant. Not that it matters, really. He groans and slaps a hand against the desk. Or, he tries to. It passes right through up until it doesn’t, and now he’s trapped up to his forearm by smooth polished wood. His hand twists in the empty air underneath, smacks into the side with a hollow thump. He tries to say something, but all that comes out of his mouth is fog. His lungs pump it out and out and it’s heavy on his tongue and wraps around his thoughts. It curls across his skin, cool and damp. He hates to think what it’s doing to the papers strewn on the desk.

After a period of time that Peter couldn’t estimate if he tried, Elias sneezes, and as if that’s a catalyst, he’s out of the chair and next to Peter, hands on Peter’s arm yanking. “Sorry,” he says. “Forgot I could.”

Peter screeches, at the heat of Elias’s hands on his clammy skin and at the resistance of his flesh where it won’t budge from the dark grain. Elias lets go, touches again. Not pulling, just feeling. His fingers reach where Peter’s skin meets the desk, the two fused together. There’s a silent moment where they both take it in.

“That’s not...” Elias says.

“Not supposed to happen,” Peter says. Not how his relationship with his patron has ever worked. Not really any of the other Fears’ _modus operandi_.

“Knife,” Elias says abruptly.

“Knife?”

Elias is already fumbling around with the drawers. He finds what he’s searching for and pulls it out: a cleaver, gleaming and wicked sharp. “Knife,” he repeats, and explains in the most words he’s said yet. “Melanie brought it in once. Didn’t succeed, but it was a good effort.”

“Melanie...”

“He told you.” Elias frowns. “I know he told you. She kept trying to kill him, to get out of the Archives. Shame she failed, really.”

Peter was nodding along slowly, the words sounding vaguely right, but that shocks him out of it. “Now, hold on—”

“I’ve got this,” Elias says, fumbles in the air until he grabs Peter’s arm with his off hand, and drives the blade into the wood with a brisk motion. Peter holds very, _very_ still. Elias stabs the desk again and again in a rough, wide semicircle around Peter’s arm, then starts putting weight on the handle. The wood cracks and splinters. He does it in another place, then another, until the whole thing is weakened. Then he sets the knife aside and presses down, down, practically hopping for just a little more leverage. Peter joins in, tugging his arm up and down in turns. At last it gives way, and together they slam practically face-first into the remainder of the table.

They stand up. Peter gives his shoulder a full rotation, the desk-fragment still not budging from his arm. He looks to Elias again, though his sight is obscured by the thick fog that still lingers. The other man is running his hand over the rough edge of the hole in the desk.

“This was two hundred years old,” Elias says. “He had it made when he started the Institute, he said, and took care of it ever since.”

Peter considers this. He thinks he should maybe have more of a reaction to that than what he’s scrounging up right now. “I’m sorry,” he says, because he’s pretty sure those are words that fit.

“No,” Elias says. His thumbnail digs into the exposed wood. “Let’s break it.”

“What?”

“Let’s _break it_.”


End file.
